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Copyright: Toni Straka, 2005-2011 This blog is for information and entertainment purposes only. Under no circumstances does this information represent a recommendation to buy or sell securities or any other type of investment instruments.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Wednesday has become my favorite day of the week. Not only that I can watch the markets comfortably with my feet on my desk I can also take relief from the fact that The Mogambu Guru will deliver his next treasured piece of comedy intertwined with so many hard facts that I am always tempted to run and get a few more ounces of gold. Unfortunately there is no way to buy physical silver in Austria unless one is willing to pay 20% VAT for it. So much about government intervention in a monetary metal.Having had delivered a few cases of fine Austrian Goesser beer along with some homemade applestrudel also helped to improve the relationship with The Mogambo Guru. His column came on my desk just before my lunch break. He obviously had had his meal already, telling from the greasy spots all over the manuscript.As always, enjoy reading his latest column and maybe use gold's current correction to buy some ounces yourself. It is time. According to his research there are only 4.8 billion ounces of gold; but the current global population count comes in at some 6.5 billion people.

Less Than An Ounce For All Of Usby The Mogambo Guru

Things are getting so weird that even my extreme Mogambo paranoia (EMP) seems oddly inadequate. For example, gold is going bananas! Several people asked me what this could possibly mean, but, as usual, I have no idea. It's like when people ask why my wife, who is such a nice, pretty person, would marry a disgusting creep like me or why she hasn't at least have killed me long ago; it is weird, but that is all I know. But I DO know that there are a hell of a lot of people sitting on some big, big, big positions on the short side of gold (and mining shares), and these hapless chumps are getting crushed, I mean freaking crushed, with gold is soaring like this. The statistic that keeps pounding pounding pounding in my tiny little Mogambo brain (TLMB) is that there is, reportedly, a short position in gold, measured in umpteen jillions of ounces, that is 78 times as big as all the gold in the whole damned world! That means that one guy has some gold, and 78 guys THINK that they own some gold, but they don't. All they have is a slip of paper that says "I owe you gold" and signed by somebody. Somebody who does not, obviously, have any gold to give!What I am confessing is that that people who sent money to The Mogambo Gold Depository (actually a shoebox in the back of my closet) and think that they have some gold, just because I promised that I would store gold for them, are screwed. I always MEANT to go out and get some gold like I said I would, but one thing led to another, and then there was that drunken brawl at Paula's Passion Pit of Prancing Princesses that I take full responsibility for, and am still paying for all the damages, so don't get me wrong. But the gold you thought I was storing for you? Sorry. Bummer, huh?COMEX Gold Contracts Only Guarantee Fiat MoneyFortunately, I have taken the wise precaution of wording the deposit contract to mimic the Comex rules, and now, since I am on the hook to lose a lot of money, I can merely cancel their stupid contracts and give them their original money back! Without interest! Hell, I might just keep the money for myself to make up for MY looming losses from the lawsuits that will soon be filed. It's the American Way!But the point is that people who erroneously think they have gold safely stored away someplace, and who have not seen the 60 Minutes show where they expose this dirty little Mogambo scam of mine, are all out dancing in the streets, thinking they are rich rich rich, and they're buying drinks for everybody, and they're all laughing and having fun. And every time gold goes up by another few bucks, everybody is even happier and they start having even MORE fun!Bullion Banks Are Net ShortSo, in a strange yin-yang thing, you can bet that this rise in gold has lots and lots of other people (namely the people who are short all that gold, and the central banks who lent all that gold to bullion banks, who sold it long ago at prices far below this, and are now net short in gold) are in a real panic. Now all those shorts are rushing about in desperation and panic, including elected officials, banks, bullion banks, central banks and especially the Federal Reserve, which is ALSO nervous about all that gold belonging to the United States that has been lent out to guys who can't pay it back! Yow!The only guys who are NOT rushing around in panic are the guys who have taken possession of physical gold bullion. They know EXACTLY where their gold is, and we have enough firepower to keep it, too. And one of these days real soon there will be lots and lots of guys who will ring our doorbells ("ding dong!") and who will say things like "Please please please PLEASE PLEASE please please sell me some of your gold!" and who want to buy it at absurdly high prices. And if you are buying gold right now, then one day that will be YOUR doorbell ringing, and you can decide for yourself if you will sell them a little of your gold for some big, BIG money, or chase them off with a mighty shotgun blast and your laughter ringing in their ears.End Of The Credit Fueled BoomBut this is not about how I let off a few warning shots at a neighbor's kid who was acting a little too suspicious to suit me, but about how this is just the weird, scary stuff that always happens at the end of long, credit-fueled booms, especially ones where the government is the major buyer of goods and services, like now. In short, there are a lot of desperate rats trapped in a lot of corners, and they are ferociously lashing out in fear and panic, which is, if you have seen ANY horror movies at all involving rats, a very bad situation, indeed.I bring this up because a guy who likes to be an "anonymous source" reports, "if a bank has physical possession of some gold which it owes you as its creditor, the bank itself is the current owner of the gold." An interesting thing to consider! On the other hand, if the gold you deposited at the bank has your name on it as the owner, then you have what is known as "allocated gold." But if all you have is a deposit slip showing that some ounces of gold was deposited, then you have, unfortunately, unallocated gold. He goes on to say that "Unallocated gold is the most widely traded form of gold in the world. While this gold remains unallocated to you, the regulator considers it part of a bank's liquid reserve." He figures that 99% of gold deposits are in unallocated form, and therefore all the deposited gold is, in effect, in a big commingled pile in the basement of the bank.Your Gold Counts To The Banks ReservesAnother way of looking at this stunning fact is "This makes unallocated gold an attractive way for the bank to maintain its regulated liquidity, because you have paid for your gold, and the bank is free to use your money, while it is also able to add your unallocated gold holding to its own reserve."Being stunned to speechlessness at the revelation, I nevertheless raise the bony pointing finger of The Mogambo (BPFOTM) and tap on your computer screen so that you pay special attention to where he says that the bank uses YOUR gold as part of ITS reserves! If you are not impressed by the use of the exclamation point, or if you are NOT likewise impressed and horrified by the actual words, then I know that 1) you are still young and trustful, and 2) I also know that you don't realize that bank's reserves are the assets that the bank can legally use to offset its own losses. My mighty Mogambo super-brain (MMSB) detects a sudden disturbance in the fabric of the cosmos, as you that you are saying to yourself, "The banks can protect themselves and their owners by confiscating and selling the assets of the depositors? Yow!" Yow indeed, young grasshopper!So your unallocated gold could, and would, be sold if the bank were in need of cash. If the bank went bankrupt and insolvent, then you would be put in the line with all the other creditors, and you would divvy up what is left, if anything, after the bondholders have been paid and the secured creditors have been paid and lots and lots of other people have been paid and the furniture has been repossessed. Hahaha! Trust the banks? Hahaha!Now, learning this while you are still young, you perhaps now find that you are not quite as trustful anymore. Good! Now you are becoming wise, and you realize that, as they say, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."Always Insist On Allocated GoldSo what to do? Well, if your safe deposit box is full of gold, and the backyard is full of buried gold, and you are running out of places to store gold, and you want to deposit some gold at the bank so that you can make room in the den for a wide-screen TV, then the lesson is: always insist on having it treated as allocated gold. "Allocated gold is different," he says "because you become the outright owner of gold and you are no longer a creditor. Your allocated gold is your property and it cannot be used as the bank's reserve."Only 4.8 Billion Ounces Of Gold Mined - EverSo, adding all of this up in my big fat Mogambo mind (BFMM), and realizing that we are constrained by the inescapable fact that there is only about, as Jason Hommel tells us, 150,000 tonnes of gold in existence, and that the global increase, per year, is about 2,500 tonnes, then why is gold selling at only $540 an ounce?Anyway, I'm thinking of this and getting more and more confused, and I keep thinking that with such a huge, lop-sided short position in gold that has to one day "buy to cover" the short position, that there HAS to be money to be made in buying gold now! And then I read Jason Hommel, of GoldIsMoney, whose terrific new essay is entitled "Central Banks Now Buying Gold" should make those gold shorts cry. He reports that "The Russian Central bank is buying up to 1,000 tonnes of gold, to double its gold holdings from 500 tonnes, most of which, 377 tonnes, is lent out." See? They have loaned out 65% of their gold hoard, too! To some guy who sold it, too, and thus went short to the bank, too, and I'll betcha that the bank is getting VERRRRRYYYYY nervous about the short position established with their gold, too!Mr. Hommel figures that this is probably the reason for the recent "$70 spike upwards in the gold price, and you can see this spike on any gold chart. Why the spike? Because people realized that the gold selling (and gold lending) by central banks was going to be slowing down. And it has. And now it has reversed, and is turning into central bank gold buying." Notice how he ended that sentence with a mere period. But if you have been paying attention, you would know that central banks buying bunches of gold is a big, big, BIG deal, and it CERTAINLY calls for at least one exclamation point! Like that!Anyway, I am sure that Mr. Hommel's face is burning in shame from the punctuation faux pas and that whole exclamation point thing, but you'd never know it, as he goes on to write "Argentina, South Korea, & South Africa are also gold buyers now. And now, China, and perhaps all of Asia!" See! Now he uses an exclamation point! Excellent!Having achieved mastery of the use of the exclamation point, Mr. Hommel moves into math. He asks "So, how much gold can $2.6 trillion U.S. dollars, held by Asian central banks, buy?" I personally have no idea, but if he asks me, I am going to give him a wisecrack reply that it is a HELL of a lot of money and hope to get a laugh from the clas, and by the time order is restored he will have forgotten that he asked me a question. But he doesn't ask for my stupid opinion! Instead, he answers his own question, which is mighty sporting of him, by saying "More gold than exists in the world! Remember, all the gold ever mined in the history of the world is 150,000 tonnes. Annual mine supply is a mere 2,500 tonnes annually!"There Is Sooo Much More Money Than GoldThen it starts really getting good. He goes on "Let's convert that to ounces, shall we? All the gold ever mined in the history of the world: 150,000 tonnes x 32,152oz./tonne = 4.8 billion ounces. At current prices of $524/oz., that's 2.5 trillion dollars! " So, now we have established that all the gold in the whole world is currently valued at $2.5 trillion. I am thinking to myself "Should I bring up the fact that this is about the same amount as the American federal government budgets every year, and is about half of what it actually spends?" and decide that not even I want to think about that, especially since there was a time when gold WAS money, so obviously the government, spending twice as much money as all the gold in the world is worth, means that the government is waaayyy too big, or that gold is waaayyy too cheap.So I don't bring it up, and it's a good thing, too, as he goes on to say "Now, compare that to the popular estimate that that the total tradable supplies of gold are actually about $1.6 trillion.""So, what we have is the Russians buying about $8.4 billion worth of gold, and this is causing the gold price to move up. And now, Asia is going to spend a portion of $2.6 trillion (in dollars in their foreign reserves), that's TRILLION, or $2,600 billion, on gold? Where do you think gold prices are headed? At this point, guessing a final top is ridiculous, but you can know for certain that in the coming months and years, gold is going to go way, way, way up from here. Probably well beyond $10,000 to $30,000/oz."Get Some Ounces TodayI know what you are thinking; you are suddenly crazed by your greed, but since everything else that you own is now a piece of crap and not worth anything, you are wondering if you could sell your children on eBay in exchange for gold bullion because you want to get in on this action in gold and make a lot of money! But before you start composing your ad, listen to this: Mr. Hommel goes on to say, and you can tell by the way I am actually salivating at the prospect of getting rich by merely owning gold, "And Asia's $2.6 trillion is nothing compared to the size of the bond markets. We have $22 trillion in U.S. bonds that could also be sold for gold. After all, big money is FORCED to seek out returns, and protect itself from being devalued."My eyes are spinning in my head here! And my greed gland is squirting out, apparently, a hormone that makes me salivate. I noticed that the front of my shirt is suddenly soaked in drool at the same time as he was saying "And Japan alone has about $10 trillion dollars worth of yen that could also buy gold."Bonds Are Guaranteed To Go DownHell, just a tiny fraction of all that money buying gold would be, be, be, I am mesmerized by the prospect! He then brings me back to reality by making the point that "bonds and gold are competing asset classes", and as such "With gold heading up about 20% per year now for 4 years since 2001 from $255/oz., and no top in sight, why would any sane person choose to hold bonds paying 4%, when inflation is about 7-8%? Bonds are guaranteed to go down in value, and will be forced to buy gold for the returns. It's as simple as that." At that, I jump up onto my seat in my excitement, my fists punching the air as I bellow "Yes! Yes! It is EXACTLY as simple as that!"Silver Will Rise And Rise And RiseAnd even better, Mr. Hommel supports my belief that while gold is a great investment, silver is a better investment. Taking a decidedly metaphorical tack, he soothingly writes "Acorns can grow into big oak trees, but oak trees cannot grow to the moon. Silver is like the acorn, gold is like a young sapling. The acorn will grow at a much faster rate, and in the end, they may be both the same size!"Toni Straka at The Prudent Investor has not been looking at silver, but instead has been looking at the central banks selling gold under their agreement, and writes "Euro members were quite heavy sellers and as a rule of thumb one notes that the bigger the budget problems, the bigger were the gold sales. The ECB itself sold off 6.5% or 1.6 million ounces in the first 10 months of the year, which leaves it with 23.05 million ounces. The biggest seller in absolute terms was France. Second come the Netherlands. The bronze medal for the biggest gold sellers is awarded to Spain. Rank #4 goes to Portugal." On the other side of the ledger, he notes that Greece, Ireland and Finland each bought some gold. "Summing all this up," Mr. Straka says "I arrive at a figure of 10.05 million ounces sold and 6,249 ounces bought."5 Important Things About Bernanke - And Where He Might Be WrongI was stunned to read an article on the front page of last Wednesday's WSJ about Ben Bernanke entitled "Long Study of Great Depression Has Shaped Bernanke's Views", by Greg Ip. I was flabbergasted that Mr. Ip, for whom I now have a sudden gigantic respect for, did not tear Mr. Bernanke a new one. If you are like me, then you do not want to read a long article because your lips get tired, but want something short and sweet. To those persons, Mr. Ip has graciously included a summary in an inset box on the front page, bearing the title "History Course." According to research into Bernanke's own book, speeches and articles that he has written, we owe a debt of thanks to Mr. Ip for his efforts, as we can quickly learn, as a result, five important things about Ben Bernanke.

First, we learn that he thinks we should "Beware of outdated orthodoxies such as the gold standard." Hahaha! Wrong! Right off the bat he is wrong! There IS nothing other than a gold standard, or somewhere in the musty, misty mists of time someone else would have thought of it LONG before this! And everything else that they ever thought of turned out to be a big, ugly mistake.

Secondly, he believes "A stable/banking/financial system is critical." Correct. At least he is not a TOTAL idiot!

Thirdly we now know that he thinks "The Fed's key objective should be stable prices." Correct again! Hey! This isn't so bad! He's right two out of three! Maybe I was too tough on the guy! Let's read more!

Fourthly, "Don't try to prick asset bubbles." Wrong again. I say no, and I say "no" with a sneering look of arrogance on my sullen, insolent face. To say otherwise would be to say "Inflation in food is bad, but inflation in assets is good!" Hahaha! Moron! Inflation in ANYTHING is bad!

Now I'm really getting snotty and supercilious, and I hiss, "Two right and two wrong! Your precious little Ben Bernanke is not doing so well, is he, America?" So with trembling eyes we go on to read the

fifth, and last, thing about him, which is that he believes that "An inflation target can defend against deflation and inflation." Gaaakk! I am too flabbergasted to speak! The Mogambo is, finally, speechless! Then, finally, from deep inside the manly Mogambo chest (MMC), a laugh begins to bubble up, getting louder and louder! Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAA!"

Inflation Does NOT Defend Against InflationThis is, without a doubt, the most stupid thing that I have EVER read! And I have read some stupid, stupid, stupid things in my time, and have written stuff even stupider, too! A LOT more stupider, as the very use of the word "stupider" implies. But, and ignore the way I am laughing my guts out, inflation defends against inflation? Hahahaha! How the hell he can even keep a straight face when he says something like that is beyond me! Hahaha! Inflation defends against inflation! Hahaha! Slapping your face defends against your face getting slapped? Stealing your car defends against your car getting stolen? Hahaha! This is too much! No! No, wait! How about this; how about if I run around on my wife to defend against me running around on my wife? Hahaha! This is great stuff!I can't wait to use this stuff as a legal line of defense the next time the judge asks me why in the hell I am back in his court again and how he is going to throw the book at me this time, what with his "No more Mister Nice Guy!" crap and all. Well, screw that! With a short trumpet fanfare ("ta-daaaa!") I unveil to you, Loyal Mogambo Reader (LMR), the Bernanke Defense! How it works is that while the judge is picking up the book to throw at me, see, I run up, fall on my knees, and, clasping my hands together, say "But Judge! I am back in front of you again, on these trumped-up charges, so that I can defend against appearing in front of you again! That's the way it works now! It worked for Ben Bernanke, Judge! Nobody threw HIM in jail! He's murdering our money by promising us inflation, and he is walking around free as a bird! Yet, here am I, bedecked in chains and a smelly straightjacket because of some minor misunderstanding about registering an insignificant self-propelled howitzer cannon, and how I TRIED to register it, but the police told me that I CAN'T register a cannon, so naturally I figured that you didn't NEED a license or anything! And besides, I got the cannon only to defend against myself getting a cannon!" See how neat this Bernanke Defense is? Dontcha just love it? Wow!Naive And AbsurdMr. Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital has no interest in my legal problems or new strategy, but he also read the article, and concludes, in his usual refined way, "Not only are his assertions naive and egotistical, but flat-out absurd."Anyway, the rest of the article is about how Bernanke is this self-described big shot "expert" on the Great Depression or something, and he considers that understanding it to be the "Holy Grail of economics". Hahaha! To show you the shallowness of his thinking, a quote from the article about how people borrow money to buy a house or business may prove instructive, as he says, "But deflation, even though it leaves the loans value untouched, erodes the value of the collateral and shrinks the borrower's equity." Well duh!Deflation Can Only Happen After There Was A BubbleWhat this halfwit Bernanke twit does NOT understand is WHY there was deflation in the first damned place! Why did the price of the asset go down? I leap to my feet and shout, "You want to know why? I'll tell you why! The price went down because the price had gotten so high! THAT is why the price went down!" Jeez! You would think that a guy that is the new chairman of the Federal Reserve would know that!Now I will tell you why he doesn't want to get into that inflation part, and the reason is that his own damned Federal Reserve created too much money and credit, and a succession of idiots borrowed money to buy assets from each other, around and around, inflating their prices until, finally, one day, the damned assets are too overpriced. Then they go down. Simple.Monetary InflationIn short, you get a deflation because first you have an inflation in the money supply, which shows up as an inflation prices, all of it (and this is the part that makes me stand up on my chair and howl "aaahhoooOOOOooooooooooo" like an angry, wounded wolf in my rage AND outrage, to show you how enraged I was) is caused by the damned idiots at the Federal Reserve playing footsie with the other banks under its control, so that the banks can make more money by loaning more money, which is monetary inflation, and the money goes into buying assets, causing inflation in those assets, but after awhile the economy can't support those prices, and they adjust (down) to their "natural", or "neutral" value where they would have been all along if there hadn't been any money to chase prices up and up.Peter Schiff agrees with me, although he doesn't like agreeing with me in public or being seen in public with me, or even calling him on the phone for that matter, and he doesn't even mention my name as he writes, "The mistake made by the Fed during the 1920's was expanding the supply of money and credit too rapidly. However, as increasing productivity prevented consumer prices from rising, the Fed was unconcerned about the inflation it was creating. Instead, the excess money and credit that spilled into financial and real estate markets caused asset prices to rise, which resulted in claims of a 'new era' (sound familiar?). The bust of 1929 led to the Great Depression of the 1930's not as a result of Fed tightening, as Bernanke claims, but due to the misguided economic policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. "Credit Inflation 1929 - And NOWAnd speaking of the Great Depression, the lead-in to the latest Richebächer Letter was a quote from Melchior Palyi from his book "Twilight of Gold, Myths and Realities." He writes, "The chief reason for the financial confusion in the late 1920s, as in similar eras of the past, was the credit inflation. Combined with stable price levels, it generated a sense of security and an overestimation of the expansionary potential. This misled a dynamic society into reckless speculative ventures on an unprecedented scale. Believers in monetary stability were carried away by their wishful thinking."Ergo, you get a deflation after you have an inflation, which, in the case of the Great Depression, was caused by the Federal Reserve acting like bonehead halfwits in the 20's. The Great Big Freaking Depression that is now encroaching upon us was caused by the Fed acting like bonehead halfwits during the 80's and 90's. And most of the 80's, and 70's, and 60's, too! Which was, for the record, all necessitated by the idiotic Congress deficit-spending.Highest Consumer Debt Levels In HistoryBill Bonner of DailyReckoning hears us talking about Greenspan and Bernanke, and says "During Greenspan’s reign at the Fed, more new money and credit has been created than under all the rest of the Fed chiefs combined. Consumer debt rose to its highest level in history, the ratio of debt to income also rose higher than it has ever been. The effect was to inspire bubbles all over the world and to transform the United States from the world's largest creditor to its biggest debtor."What the Greenspan Fed had accomplished was to put off a natural, cyclical correction and transmogrify an entire economy into a monstrous economic bubble. On the other side of the globe, foreign businessmen worked overtime to meet the phony new demand; China has enjoyed a capital spending boom as excessive as any the world has ever seen."TCMD Trebled Under GreenspanSteve Lachance, who is a financial translator, elaborates on that point and writes "Since 1987, the year Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, TCMD (total credit market debt) has more than tripled, from $13 trillion to $40 trillion, and now accounts for well over 300% of GDP. This debt growth is without precedent by any relative or absolute measure, and is evidence that the US has experienced a debt bubble."If you are not interested in all that old history crap, perhaps because you are such a "now" and "happening" kind of person, then you may be interested to have Mr. Lachance clue you into what is happening currently. Mr. Lachance obliges by announcing "According to the most recent Flow of Funds report from the Federal Reserve, TCMD expanded by $799 billion in the third quarter of 2005. At this rate, debt growth for a single year is $3 trillion, or 50% greater than total US industrial production." Hahahaha! $3 trillion a year in more debt! More than a quarter of GDP! In one lousy year! We're freaking doomed!Consumer Spending About To CollapseAnother bit of jarring recent news is that in October, paradoxically, consumer installment debt went DOWN by $7.2 (although seasonally adjusted) billion dollars. In one month! It is a collapse in consumer spending that is (and here I am quoting the Wall Street Journal), the "biggest dollar amount on record" according to the Federal Reserve! The biggest on record! I have redacted the original transcript of my actual utterance upon learning this, so that now the officially record reads that I said "Yipes!" and the humorously quaint "Run for the hills, boys!" Those who know me are probably thinking to themselves "Hmmm! That certainly doesn't sound like The Mogambo at all!" And they would be right, because, in reality, it was mostly me screaming in mortal dread and outrage, over and over, that we are freaking doomed, we're freaking doomed, we're freaking doomed, over and over and over, as the implications of it started to sink into my tiny little Mogambo brain (TLMB).So this means that the 70% of the entire Gross Domestic Product of the USA that is attributed to consumers, meaning 70% of all the goods and services produced in the whole country in a whole damned year, took a big whack to the wallet? The HUGE part of the economy that makes its money by catering to the consumer who was buying all this stuff took, in total, as a group, a whack to the corporate wallet that was the biggest whack to the corporate wallet that THEY have ever had, too? Again, in the official transcript, it shows me responding "Yipes" and "Run for the hills!" and, again, that would be a lie to sugar-coat the loud, and mostly obscenity-laden, truth.Gold Should Be At $2,176 in Real 1980 TermsBut it is gold that we are speaking about in such loving terms, as only precious metals can protect us from the predations of the central banks. And since we are talking about gold, what about the price? Martin Weiss of Money and Markets newsletter writes, "Today, it would take a gold price of $2,176 to equal the inflation-adjusted value of that ounce of gold in 1980. So put another way, today's gold price of $518 is less than one-quarter of what its true inflation-adjusted price was 25 years ago. Just half of that level would be $1,088, more than double today's gold price."And the price of gold is destined to go up and up, as he explains when he says "central bankers don't wake up each morning with a deliberate plan to push up gold prices. But "higher gold prices are the inevitable consequence of their routine efforts to print money and pump-prime their economies."Oil And Gas Prices Will March HigherHe goes on to say that it is thus inevitable that "oil and gas prices will continue to march higher." I raise my hand to inform Mr. Weiss that we were talking about gold, and without even pausing, he goes on to say "China and India are pressuring gold prices both directly and indirectly. First, they're buying gold themselves. Second, they're driving up worldwide inflation in natural resources all over the planet, which also drives up gold. This is big. It's happening right now. And it's not going away. "Dan Denning, of the Strategic Investment newsletter, writes that things are even worse that that, as "Gold will visit $2,000 an ounce sometime over the next few years, but not while oil languishes at $60 a barrel. Most likely, both commodities will rally together to some extent. We're headed to a place where gold hits $2,000 an ounce and oil hits $100 a barrel, in the process sending the oil/gold ratio to around 20."TOCOM Introduced Extraordinary Margins For Gold SellersAnd perhaps part of the recent wildness in gold may be related to a story sent to me by my old buddy, Phil S. The scoop is that the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (Tecom) had a news release dated December 12. The text of the release is that they are imposing what are called Extraordinary Margins on gold futures which, in terms of money, doubled the margins for all NEW contracts. Hmmm! And the sellers of gold options have had their margins raised, too, but not, oddly enough, for buyers! Another hmmm! Anyway, the important point is; what actual date separates the OLD contracts (with the low margins) from the NEW contracts (with higher margins)? It turns out that any contracts dated December 14 or later are new contracts, while anything December 13 and before is an old contract. The news release came out on the 12th.And I'll tell you another reason why the rise in precious metals is not going away. The Chinese top dogs and a lot of other foreign top dogs, unlike Americans top dogs, care about what their descendents think of them, and they want to be revered as noble and wise ancestors and rulers, and not be remembered as a spendthrift, debt-addled plague upon his neighbors and children, most of whom all think that just because their stupid new, fancy barbeque grill disappears that I somehow took it and sold it at the flea market and used the money to buy this really nifty new 55-degree golf wedge that I really, really needed.Budget Deficit Hit A November RecordAs an example of this idiocy and shamelessness of Americans, from MarketWatch.com we get the report "The U.S. federal budget deficit widened as expected to $83.1 billion in November, the largest deficit of any November, the Treasury Department said Monday. A year ago, the deficit was $57.9 billion." No matter how much we owe, no matter how out of whack federal finances are, they always spend more and more and more! Ugh.****Mogambo sez: Whatever the hell is going on, it means that gold is being temporarily suppressed, and that gives you the chance to buy some more on the cheap. And with the gigantic short position in the world, I suggest that you take physical possession of your gold and silver bullion. Remember that somebody has to get screwed, and if you leave gold lying around in other people's vaults, then that person will, most likely, be you.

The Mogambu Guru's straightforward writings are made possible by The Daily Reckoning.Richard Daughty aka The Mogambo Guru is general partner and COO of the Smith Consultant Group and can be emailed at scgcjs@gte.net.

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EXCERPT FROM THE US CONSTITUTION, Article I, section 10: No State shall ... coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts....

FROM THE US TREASURY WEBSITE: "Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy."

A LESSON FROM HISTORY BOOKS: The past 300 years have proven that ALL fiat money experiments ended in complete devaluation. From Rome to Britain: every empire vanished into oblivion soon after it went off the gold standard. It is time to recognize the obvious: Unbacked money has never worked.

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About Me

I am an INDEPENDENT Certified Financial Analyst who worked as a financial journalist for 15+ years and now evaluate global market trends. Analyzing financial and political news permanently I want to share my insight with those who understand that we are in an era of global redistribution of wealth. The US-European centric approach does not work anymore. 6 billion people in the developing countries now demand their fair share of the world's resources.
Having worked many years for a leading newswire I have learned to understand the fatal concept of ever expanding credit by heart. If you want to learn about the future of the economy, study history.